Videos

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Maciunas Laughter (Soloist Edition) at Port 25, Mannheim

2021
“Fluxus was a joke!” – said George Maciunas on his death bed. He had a very unusual sense of irony in him, which was also a quality of many of Fluxus works. Despite their playful attitude, Fluxus artists were serious about changing the balance of power in the art world. They did not agree with the authority of museums to determine the “high art”. Constituted between human an animal world, laugh is an atavistic feature, both gesture and language. Maciunas considered it to be the only form of human expression which transforms the whole body into a ”corporeal concretism”. Laughter is a conceptual exercise, our unconscious performance, “an opening in which self unfolds”, and thus a way to evoke personality. Maciunas was a complex men, who until this day remains enigmatic and mythic. I decided to learn his laughter (to adapt it to my own rather than mimic) as I found it to be his feature that is the most constant, the part of his personality that hasn’t changed despite all of his – not always easy - life events (laughter is not a quality we learn over life, like speaking for example, but it is already embedded in our identities). ‘Storing’ his laugher in my body I can hand it down and share it with other people, meaning that the choir performs the laughter only after my tutoring (without hearing the original sound of Maciunas’). I have chosen to work with a choir as laughter never appears as singular act but always as multiplicity, and communicate what could not be said with words. Thus, laughing together becomes a social practice, but also, a musical and spiritual experience.
Added on: July 28, 2023

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Maciunas Laughter (Fluxus Edition)

2021
Performed by: Eric Andersen, Alain Arias-Misson, Jeff Berner, Jacques Donguy, Charles Doria, Charles Dreyfus Pechkoff, Bartolomé Ferrando, Peter Frank, Ken Friedman, Coco Gordon, John Halpern, Kevin Harrison, Jessica Higgins, Bengt af Klintberg, Jarosław Kozłowski, Alison Knowles, Bob Lens, Patrice Lerochereuil, Billie Maciunas, Ann Noel, Jeffrey Perkins, Norie Sato, Joshua Selman, Wim T. Shippers, Frank Trowbridge A special online version of “Maciunas Laughter (Choir Edition)” dedicated to and performed by Fluxus artists. This performance of collective laughter is an alteration of its initial version that took place at MoMA (at the premier screening of Jeff Perkins movie “George: The Story of George Maciunas and Fluxus”). Later the piece was performed also at the Emily Harvey Foundation or The EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, among others.
Added on: July 28, 2023

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Close (to) the Sky

An audio composition consisting of multiple artists’ voices expressing their views on closing the “firmament,” an artistic and political gesture in solidarity with the victims of the war in Ukraine. "I remember what the sky was like before the war. All the sunsets and sunrises. And now, here, in the shelter, this luxury is no longer available to me. I haven’t seen the sky in seven days." (words of a war victim in Kiev) CLOSE THE SKY: this sentence has become a kind of slogan of this war, even seen by some as president Zelensky’s "bargaining chip" to convince NATO countries to create a no-fly zone over Ukraine. “Russia has turned the Ukrainian sky into a source of death for thousands of people. I have a dream. These words are known to each of you today. I can say: I have a need. I need to protect our sky,” he speaks out. In times where words like beastly, vicious, or inhuman seem too soft to describe the madness of Russian invasion in its neighboring country, CLOSE THE SKY sounds almost like a poetic, dreamy statement. How can one physically close the sky if we can’t even touch it? But at the same time lives of many human beings depend on it. It is also the title of a book of poetry by Jayanta Mahapatra (published in 1971), in whose poems “Nothing iswhat it seems and what it seems to be is nothing.” In Ukrainian reality described by Volodymyr Yermolenko “A window is not a window [and] light is not light” anymore. Suddenly, they have to be read in terms of potential threat that they may bring. A shattered pane can kill you and a lamp can turn you into a target. That the sky returns to its original meaning is a wish for Ukraine. Acknowledgments to participating artists: AnimaeNoctis, Karolina Beimcik, Magdalena Ciemierkiewicz, George Cloke, Cecil de Fatima, Tomás Cunha Ferreira, Sylwia Gorak, Coco Gordon, Tomoko Hojo, Chihiro Ito, Paula Kaniewska, Karolina Majewska, John Maters, Jen Mazza, Tsuneko Taniuchi
Added on: July 28, 2023